News

With the current world-wide coronavirus pandemic, more people are working from outside the safety of their usual secure corporate networks. This opens your company up to a whole slew of new hacks and security concerns. Fortunately, there are options when it comes to locking down access to your proprietary data and internal systems.

Right now, when people think of seamless, end-to-end message encryption, they’re likely to think of WhatsApp (which has over a billion users) or Signal (which developed the baseline open source encryption technology). There’s a good reason for this: five years ago, when Signal was launched, it offered a pioneering commitment to both privacy and ease-of-use. "The choices we’re making, the app we're trying to create, it needs to be for people who don’t know how to enable airplane mode on their phone," Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike said in a recent Wired article—and it seems like the project largely succeeding at setting a high standard for ease-of-use.

Every year, the bar for SWIFT CSP compliance gets pitched a little bit higher. For 2020, a number of advisory controls were upgraded to mandatory, including a control related to shrinking the threat surface in banking organizations through application hardening. This is a wise tactic: as attackers carrying out fraudulent transactions get more sophisticated, financial institutions need to do the same when it comes to information security. At the same time, it’s not clear that increased mandatory advisories will be enough to stem the year-over-year increase in SWIFT CSP fraud.